University of Manchester, Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Arthur Lewis Building, Bridgeford Street, Manchester, M139PL, UK.
Soc Sci Med. 2011 Dec;73(11):1661-8. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.09.033. Epub 2011 Oct 10.
Assisted conception involving donor insemination challenges cultural idioms of parenthood and family; there is now a growing body of work exploring how women and couples negotiate becoming a family in this way. But sperm donation also raises questions on the more intimate levels of sex, sexuality and sexual bodies, and these have received little sustained attention in the literature. Lesbian couples in the U.K. increasingly negotiate access to medicalised donor insemination, but many also conceive in informal arrangements with donors where they themselves negotiate proximity and contact with donors when retrieving donor sperm. I explore in this paper how lesbian couples manage and perceive sperm donations, how they seek to negotiate their intimate, sexual and bodily overtones, and how the medical and non-medical settings enable them to do this in different ways. I draw on empirical data from an interview study conducted from 2006 to 2009 in England and Wales comprising 25 lesbian couples. I suggest that sperm donation raises dilemmas of intimacy for lesbian couples, and that couples try to resolve such dilemmas by carefully and intentionally choreographing donation events through managing patterns of movement and action. The different institutional, medical and regulatory frameworks governing clinical and non-clinical sperm donation shape that management in significant and different ways. I argue that sperm donation choreographies enable couples to negotiate the private, sexual and intimate tensions surrounding sperm donations, and also the subjectivity of the sperm donor.
辅助受孕涉及供精授精，这对父母身份和家庭的文化习语提出了挑战；现在有越来越多的研究探讨女性和夫妇如何以这种方式组建家庭。但是，精子捐赠也引发了关于性、性行为和性身体更亲密层面的问题，而这些问题在文献中很少得到持续关注。英国的女同性恋夫妇越来越多地协商获得医学化的供精授精，但许多夫妇也在与捐赠者进行非正式的安排中怀孕，在这种情况下，她们自己在取回捐赠精子时与捐赠者协商接近和接触。本文探讨了女同性恋夫妇如何管理和感知精子捐赠，她们如何试图协商自己的亲密、性和身体暗示，以及医疗和非医疗环境如何以不同的方式使她们能够做到这一点。我借鉴了 2006 年至 2009 年在英格兰和威尔士进行的一项访谈研究的实证数据，该研究包括 25 对女同性恋夫妇。我认为，精子捐赠给女同性恋夫妇带来了亲密关系的困境，夫妇们试图通过精心策划捐赠活动来解决这些困境，即通过管理运动和行动模式来进行策划。管理临床和非临床精子捐赠的不同机构、医疗和监管框架以显著不同的方式塑造了这种管理。我认为，精子捐赠编排使夫妇能够协商围绕精子捐赠的私人、性和亲密紧张关系，以及精子捐赠者的主观性。
